 My folks, I'm Mike, and I hope you're well. As you can see, I'm surrounded by cardboard boxes, and that's because I'm still in the process of moving from one studio to another. I hope to reveal that new studio to you very, very soon. I tell you what, it doesn't get expensive setting up a studio, does it? So some freebies and some bargains are always welcome. I've got five amazing free plugins for you in today's video and also a bargain. If you follow the link in the description down below, you'll get 7% off of our sponsor for this video, DistroKid. Now let's dive in and take a look at the first of those plugins. The word legends is probably thrown around a little too freely sometimes, isn't it? Well, how about this? This is a new free piano library from Spitfire Audio. It works in their free labs player, and it's called Autograph Grand. Now the library is sampled from a Yamaha C6 piano based in Woodshed Recording Studios in Malibu, and it's been played by such legends as Paul Simon, Barbara Streisand, Lady Gaga, Metallica. The list goes on, but I do think that they qualify as legends. Now there's not a lot to say about this library, so let's just have a quick listen. Now as I say, not a lot of controls. We have a volume control here, and we have this, which is a dynamics control. This is actually quite interesting. I feel this is quite useful. If we put this all the way down, not only is it a little quieter, but it sounds really like a sort of a dampened piano as if you've used the damp pedal. Let's have a listen to this again. And if you want to get really sort of bright sounding, you can go to the other extreme. I mean if you automate that during the course of a song, it's going to feel really sort of dynamic as the control suggests, but it's really going to add a lot of sort of expression to the song. We have another couple of controls. This one's set to tightness at the moment, this big sort of dial here. We can click on that and switch it to reverb. Definitely I'm going to recommend this because I've got a feeling if later in the year I should do the best free plugins or libraries from 2023, I've got a feeling this may well be on there. Eon Arp, as its name suggests, is an arpeggiator plugin from Modalix. I hope I'm saying that correctly. Now this is really useful if for example you've got a favorite synthesizer plugin, but it doesn't have an arpeggiator built into it. You can use this to trigger another plugin. Okay, now it does have its own built-in synth. You can see that switched on here. Now I'm going to say up front, I don't think that that is its strength whatsoever. So it is useful that you can use this to trigger other plugins. Having said that, I'm actually going to be using its own built-in synth during this demo. I've got this preset loaded up here called Organish, but I'm also at the same time triggering another plugin and that is this one. This is Pigments from Arturia. Okay, so you'll be hearing both at the same time. Now you can see one of the preset patterns already loaded up here. They've cleverly made the word Eon out of a pattern. Let's just have a quick listen to what's happening as I play a few variations on a G major chord here. Right, really simple and straightforward to use. You've got your various steps you can see here of your patterns. As you would expect, you could sort of double click and add a new step in like so. You can move them around, you can change the length, etc, etc. I'm not going to do a tutorial on how you do that, but it's pretty intuitive all in all. One of the nice things you can do is store several patterns though and then trigger them with key switches. So you can see there's several patterns being created at the top here as I click at the top, but I can flick between them using key switches. So the first one is on C and then as I press D on the keyboard, we go to the second one, the third one, etc is on E. So you could change between them like so. It starts to get really creative like that. Follow the link in the description down below to get hold of this free arpeggiator. Now, analog obsession are a company who've decided to release all of their plugins for free. You are encouraged, however, to sign up for their Patreon, which I would encourage you to do. There is three plugins, which I think really stand out from the crowd, but there is actually a great variation of plugins available from them. Before we dive into that, talking about a great variation, there's a great variation of places you can release your music if you sign up with the sponsor of this video, DistroKid. One of the great things about DistroKid is its simplicity. For the simple price of $19.99 per year, you can upload an unlimited number of original tracks with no extra fees. Those tracks will be distributed on streaming platforms such as Spotify, TikTok, iTunes, Amazon Music and many more without you needing to open accounts at any of those places. And if $19.99 isn't cheap enough for you, follow the link in the description down below to get a further 7% off right away. I will also get a small commission at no extra cost to you. Thank you. Have a listen to analog obsession Room 041 Reverb plugin applied to this acoustic guitar. Now it sounds like it's in a fairly big space. We can adjust that mostly with the decay here. Now we're feeling like we're in a much bigger, smaller space. I'll turn that back up again and you'll also notice there's a stereo separation control here. I'm just going to play with that so you can hear the difference with all the way down. It's much more sort of in the center. You can hear it's much wider as we get that. So it's nice to have these features on a plugin like this, still sounding very wet at the moment. So I'll just turn that down a tad. I'll get to the preamp section in a moment, but first we'll just want to demonstrate to you that we do have a post EQ. Now what I did here was around about 780 Hz we can see there, I just did a bit of gain reduction to get rid of some of the mud there. I'll just turn it back up again so you can hear how it's sounding originally. That's where the mud is. That just helps to control the lower end of a reverb. And then I just added a little bit of sparkle on the high end here. So I just picked around about 14 kHz there and I just gave it a little bit of boost there. I'll exaggerate that for you now so you can hear what's going on. You can hear that there, it's too much now. So I had it down here. Now I've also got a high pass filter happening there, but you'll notice unusually compared to other reverb plugins, there's this drive control. This just adds some distortion. I've got it completely clean at the moment, but I'll sort of turn it up and I'm going to put the wet signal up pretty high so you can clearly hear what's happening here. Have a listen. So you can hear that the actual wet signal is really overdriven and distorted. They're probably not very suitable for an acoustic guitar, but it could be useful on all kinds of other instruments. So I definitely recommend you grab hold of this to have in your reverb arsenal. SSQ is an SSL style EQ plugin from Analog Obsession. It's a great start if you want to try and add a little bit of analog character whilst you're EQing in your productions. If you've never used anything like this before, let me give you a super quick overview sort of tutorial. If we look at these coloured buttons in the middle here, we've got some brown ones, some blue ones, some green ones and some red ones. They represent you adjusting different frequency ranges. The brown ones being the lowest, the red ones being the highest. How would you do that? Well let's say for example we'll work with the green ones here. Let's say for example we want to boost some frequencies. We will select the frequency here with this knob here. Let's go for about say five kilohertz here, fairly high and we're going to boost it by adjusting this gain knob here. We can either boost it or we can attenuate it, reduce it by turning it down from the center position. So let's see what happens. We'll listen to this female vocal and I'll increase it. You can hear those sort of high mids coming out there. Yeah. And you can increase the sort of range of effect of that by using the cue here. So a wider range of effect with the cue up high and much more narrow and precise with it down low. That's basically how you use these bands. But not all of them have three knobs like that. So for example in the low frequencies you don't have the cue there. What you're doing is just selecting a frequency and boosting like so. Same with the high frequencies. Now the other features that we have on here which I just want to mention quickly is the low and high pass filters which we control down here. And then finally I just want to point out that we also have, well not really finally a couple more things, we also have the ability to turn on oversampling by clicking on the word analog obsession here. So oversampling simplified is going to give you a better quality of processing although it can be sort of CPU heavy. So if you don't like that then you can have it switched off by clicking there. Now I just want to note that although we have input and output controls here you're not actually going to hear things get louder if you push this up this input control. It's gain compensated so we're going to get more of that sort of analog character by pushing it up but it's not actually going to get loud. Really really useful actually. That's a very quick overview of this SSL style EQ completely free. Follow the link in the description. Another idea borrowed from the analog world is the idea of a channel strip where you've got almost everything you need all in one spot okay to craft your sound. This one's particularly useful because it's got a DSR on it which is kind of handy for vocals but you could use it for just about anything. It's nice because it's got these components. We've got a preamp here where we can do some sort of EQing as well. We've got a DSR as I say useful for vocals. We also have an EQ which we can see in here. We have a compressor, a limiter and tape saturation as well. I mean these could be sort of five plugins couldn't they all by themselves. We can see the routing of them down here just so we know what's going to where. Well a couple of things I really like about this. First of all I love that it's got tape saturation in here. I do like that it has a wet and dry mix on the compressor and the limiter meaning we can basically do parallel compression limiting there which is always very handy without having to use sort of buses and things as well. Definitely worth checking this out if you want that kind of all in one solution that you get with the channel strip to craft your sound. Now I've got to get back to unpacking boxes and plugging in cables. If you'd like to find out a little bit more about why my new studio is so much better than my older one take a look at this video right here.